“When I was quitting, I had to kind of allow myself some quitting room and say, ‘Hey, I’m only going to smoke this amount of cigarettes this day.’ Once I hit that number, I was done for the day. Then in the next week, I smoked less, and then, I just got to the point where I just didn’t need it anymore. Now when I’m around cigarette smoke, I can’t even deal with it and I look back and think ‘I used to be that guy who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day’.”

“Quitting was kind of tough. Sometimes I felt like I was rolling a big stone up a hill. I felt apart from my friends because they still smoked. But there was a guy at work that was quitting at the same time and we checked in with each other. He would tell me ‘I’m still going strong’ and I told him ‘I’m still going strong.’

“I’m a real big sticky note person. If you put a sticky note saying “No” in the car, in the bathroom, in your purse, everywhere you go, then when you’re going to buy something, you see the note and know ‘No, don’t do it.’”

“Remove yourself as much as possible from those environments. If you just quit smoking, do not go out partying or to a club or bar where everybody is going to be smoking, because it is like dangling a carrot right in front of you.”

“The cravings were just amazing. I thought maybe if I smoked a cigarette, it will make it better. But then, I caught myself. I told myself ‘No, that would make it worse. You would just kill all that time that you haven’t smoked.’ So it was like putting one more day between it and my new self.”

“Save the money you usually spend on cigarettes after a week or a month and buy yourself something that you really want. Do it in steps. After a week, congratulate yourself. After a month, congratulate yourself.”

“For my sister-in-law, every time she got the urge to light a cigarette, she had carrots. She would keep a bag of carrots at work, she kept them with her all of the time. That worked for her, she just had carrots.”

“The plan was to quit and that is what I did. The reason I quit was because of my children and my family. I tried quitting many times before, but if I was not completely in it, I would always go back to it … It was only me that could make it happen.”